Assessment of the impact of insomnia on general health: Physical and psychological distress

Pages: 611-613
Sarika Boora (Department of Psychology, GD Goenka University, Gurgaon, Haryana)

Insomnia is a condition wherein a person has problems regarding his/her patterns of sleep. Falling asleep, being unable to remain asleep are examples of disrupted sleep patterns. Some insomniacs have trouble falling asleep and remaining asleep. The subject must also suffer some degree of impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of daytime functioning such as “tiredness, lack of energy, difficulty concentrating, and irritability”. In this study we have assessed the general health among insomniacs. For this we took a sample of 200 people, 100 control group and 100 insomniacs and applied GHQ-12 to assess general health. The result shows that Insomnia had a significant effect on General Health. Health and insomnia are often linked. Lack of sleep often ends up making people feel exhausted and fatigued and, as a result of chronic exhaustion or fatigue, people start slipping into unhealthy patterns of living. Therefore, both general health and insomnia seem to work together and take a huge physical and psychological toll on people going through these conditions. Compared with ‘good sleepers’, ‘poor sleepers’ had lower health in all domains.